Theatre Thinker - Profile of Travis Bedard by Dan Solomon, Austin Chronicle

Theatre Thinker


In the online dialogue about the art of the stage, Travis Bedard is a star

By Dan Solomon, Fri., Jan. 18, 2013

If you're reading this at two o'clock in the morning, there's a good chance that Travis Bedard is awake and on the Internet.


He's probably poring over a vast assortment of theatre blogs from around the world, but he might be on Twitter. If he is, he's either telling the more than 2,500 theatremakers who follow @TravisBedard about the best things he's read on those blogs or treating them to cranky, pithy bon mots framed as advice. ("Approaching what you do as though it's holy can be the beginnings of beauty. Forcing others to do the same never is.") Or he could be preparing a post for 2amtheatre.com, the theatre discussion blog for which he serves as managing editor. But it's a safe bet that, if it's the middle of the night, Travis Bedard is awake, online, and thinking about theatre.


The amount of time that Bedard spends thinking – and talking – about theatre has built him a not-insubstantial international following.


Read more at the Austin Chronicle on-line. . . .

Opinion: Dan Solomon's Top 10 Arts Events of 2012, Austin Chronicle

In today's weekly Austin Chronicle:

Top 10 Arts Events of 2012

Remembering the year onstage in dynamic acting, atmospheric design, and unexpected beauty

By Dan Solomon, Fri., Jan. 4, 2013

in no order:

Zac Crofford (Trouble Puppet Theatre Co.)

1) FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY FOR 'TOIL AND TROUBLE' (Trouble Puppet Theater Company) Trouble Puppet has proven itself good at everything, and when it pulls off the unexpected – like compelling, well-articulated stage combat – it just serves notice that they're still finding new ways to impress you.

2) NOEL GAULIN IN EVERYTHING Gaulin had a hell of a year – screaming, jumping, moving-as-if-on-strings, and otherwise turning himself into a live-action cartoon character in The Bear, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and Vodka, Fucking, and Television.

3) RACHEL WEISE'S DIRECTION Yeah, my wife wrote one of the lovely plays Weise directed this year, The Man Who Planted Trees. But I also loved her staging of The Bear by Anton Chekhov, and I've never even met him.

4) THE SCRIPT FOR 'MESSENGER NO. 4 (OR ... HOW TO SURVIVE A GREEK TRAGEDY)' (Cambiare Productions) Will Hollis Snider's charming and inventive epic blended Back to the Future, The Matrix, and Euripedes into something altogether new.

5) THE FINAL MINUTES OF 'JUBILEE' (Rub­ber Repertory) Making your cast jump up and down for an interminable amount of time sounds boring, and making boring-sounding things beautiful was what Jubilee did best.

6) THE ATMOSPHERE OF 'DREAM CABINET' (Salvage Vanguard Theater) Few productions set a mood more effectively.

7) EVERYTHING ABOUT 'LEGALLY BLONDE: THE MUSICAL' (Summer Stock Austin) I'm not made of stone, you guys.

8) BETH BRODERICK IN 'JUST OUTSIDE REDEMPTION' (Theatre en Bloc) Broderick stole every scene by balancing charm, humor, and gravity.

9) KACY TODD IN 'HOLIER THAN THOU' (Poison Apple Initiative) Todd carried the emotional climax of a play consisting of interconnected monologues – no mean feat.

10) SOUND DESIGN FOR 'SPACESTATION1985' (Natalie George Presents) I didn't love the play, but the sound by Buzz Moran made the outer space setting come to life.

Discussing Austin's Summer Musicals -- Robert Faires et al., Austin Chronicle

In today's Chronicle, along with reviews of the productions discussed:

Of Thee I Sing (and Dance)

The musical is America's gift to theatre, and here's the local state of the union

Robert Faires, Fri., July 20, 2012

 

What better time to celebrate the musical than the month in which our nation was founded? After all, musical theatre, like jazz, is one of America's contributions to world culture. And having recently noted the Founding Fathers' keen interest in the melodious ("Revolutionary Score," June 29), I feel they'd be particularly proud that this all-singing, all-dancing art form was born on our shores. Though, really, how could they not, when it put them in a musical of their very own?

Sadly (for me, anyway), 1776 is not among the seven musicals you can find on Austin-area stages this July. (Ah well, at least we had a tip of the tricorn to U.S. history with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson in June.) Still, the month's unofficial mini-jamboree of show-tuners is worth noting, not because it commemorates the art form's American-ness (you can bet your stars-and-bars the July cluster of musicals has more to do with lighter theatrical fare for the mind-melting summer than patriotic pride) but because of the breadth of the selections and producing companies. This small sampling includes two works from the musical's post-war golden age (1946's Annie Get Your Gun, 1959's The Sound of Music), two from the post-Watergate era of anti-romance (Into the Woods and Chess, both from 1986), and two from our own post-millennium age in which musicals are either so derivative or so self-mocking that they routinely advertise the genre in their titles (Legally Blonde: The Musical and Xanadu, both from 2007). Moreover, the productions run the gamut from all-amateur to fully pro. In this one area in this one month, you can chart the evolution of the musical over six decades and see how it's handled from the Great White Way to Main Street, U.S.A. (Drive a little farther, and you can further your musical education with The Rocky Horror Show [Smithville], Fiddler on the Roof [New Braunfels], and Hello, Dolly! and Hairspray [San Antonio].)

The current cluster of musicals offered an ideal opportunity to check in on the form as it's treated in Central Texas today. After three members of the Chronicle Arts team each reviewed a musical now running – Jillian Owens, The Sound of Music; Dan Solomon, Chess; myself, Annie Get Your Gun), we compared notes on what we'd seen and what it said about the state of the art form in our area.

Click to read more at the Austin Chronicle. . . .

Bastion Carboni: Profile and Interview by Dan Solomon for the Austin Chronicle, July 12

Bastion Carboni (photo: John Anderson)

Bastion Standard Time

Austin theatre's 'enfant terrible' swapped his poison pen for a Poison Apple, but he still gets people talking

Dan Solomon, Fri., July 13, 2012

Playwright, actor, director, and onetime theatre critic Bastion Carboni has a weird sense of humor. He'll start a sentence by laughing loudly at something he just thought of and say the joke that just occurred to him out loud. It doesn't always get the same reaction from others.

This time, we're at Home Slice Pizza, and Carboni has just come up with an idea that he's thrilled with for a photo to accompany this Chronicle profile. "It should be a photo of me with an apple shoved into my mouth, like a suckling pig, in skin-tight jeans, with the words 'c'est ne pas un enfant terrible,'" he declares, a reference to a number of things: René Magritte's famous painting, The Treachery of Images, of course, but also the name of the theatre company that he started last year, Poison Apple Initiative, as well as a blog post by local author Spike Gillespie, in which she castigated Carboni as an "enfant terrible" for his decidedly no-holds-barred approach to theatre criticism. 

Carboni served in that role for the arts and culture website Austinist for a little over a year, finally leaving last February to pursue his endeavors with Poison Apple Initiative full time, and, one can safely conclude, because he was tired of how angry people got with him for saying the things that he said about Austin theatre.

Read more at the Austin Chronicle. . . .

Profile: Matt Hislope and Josh Meyer of Rubber Repertory, by Dan Solomon for the Austin Chronicle

From today's edition:

Discomfort Zone

How far can Rubber Repertory push you?

by Dan Solomon, Fri., April 13, 2012

When Rubber Repertory started auditioning for its new show – the company's last before an "indeterminate hiatus" as half of its producing duo moves to Los Angeles – they didn't know much of anything about what they'd be putting on stage. "Our one thing was that we didn't want audience participation," co-Artistic Director Matt Hislope says.

"We wanted to put on a show," his creative partner, Josh Meyer – the moving-to-California half of the duo – adds. To help them create the performance that is Jubilee, running now at the Off Center, they looked to cast 10 people they'd never worked with before – but whom they trusted to follow them wherever they might be going.

"One of the reasons this group was selected was that they were literally up for anything," Meyer says. "We knew they'd be game for going on this journey with us. They seemed willing to go anywhere. They were all really committed." At this point in the company's career, Rubber Repertory is likely to attract the sort of performers who find being "up for anything" and "going on a journey" to be especially appealing: This is the company that built its reputation on performances including the "X-rated self-help odyssey" Mister Z Loves Company, the outright pornographic A Thought in Three Parts, and the audience-participatory performance pieces Biography of Physical Sensation – which involved an audience member wearing a vibrator throughout the duration of the show, among other experiences – and The Casket of Passing Fancy, in which audience members were offered opportunities like "Who wants to be made into a sandwich and eaten?" and "Who wants a one-on-one yoga session in the nude?"

Read more at the Austin Chronicle on-line . . . .

Arts Reporting: Dan Solomon Profiles Annie La Ganga and FronteraFest 2012 for the Austin Chronicle

Alone in the Lab

FronteraFest gives solo performers plenty of room to experiment
By Dan Solomon, Fri., Jan. 13, 2012

The first time she performed a solo show in FronteraFest's Long Fringe, Annie La Ganga wasn't really going solo. "I had two different people help me. They were my directors, kind of," she says, "and I was thinking about how I was going to make people interested, so I made a rehearsal schedule over a few weeks. And then I invited people whom I didn't know very well, whom I thought were really smart, and I asked them if they would come see my rehearsal and give me notes."

The result, for La Ganga, was a slew of critical feedback on the material she was developing for her improvised, one-woman show Let's Make Love Tonight! and a whole group of people who now considered themselves stakeholders in her show's success. "That was smart, right?" she laughs.

It's a clever approach to one of the biggest challenges that a solo performer faces when trying to fill a room for the Long Fringe at FronteraFest. While so many of the annual performance festival's signature pieces have been one-person shows, the fact is that a piece with an ensemble onstage and a crew tends to have a built-in audience; a dozen people involved in the show means a dozen people's friends, families, and fans are likely to show up. But for the performances that involve a single person onstage, the pressure is on to get people to turn out.

[image: Bret Brookshire via the Austin Chronicle]

Read full text at the Austin Chronicle. . . .

Click for Dan Solomon's Picks -- 8 Solo Pieces at Fronterafest 2012

Reviews from Elsewhere: Austinist writers on' The Incredible Shrinking Man' and 'Waiting for the Big O,' FronteraFest LF 2011

Found at Austinist.com:

Dan Solomon on The Incredible Shrinking Man, Tongue and Groove Theatre:

Tongue And Groove Theater proved itself, with The Red Balloon, to be one of Austin's more interesting theatrical stylists. Omnivorous in its approach, the company seemed determined to just create a brilliant, beautiful live experience, unconcerned with being Theater-with-capital-letters and instead mostly interested in giving audiences what they want, not what they expect.

That's a tradition it's more than carrying on with The Incredible Shrinking Man, the work-in-progress performance of which may have been the highlight of the FronteraFest Long Fringe. It's a silent piece, with three actors whom we neither hear nor see, except silhouetted behind a projector screen, and all of the backgrounds come in the form of projected animation. [. . .]

Click to real full text (270 words) at Austinist.com

Bastion Carboni on Waiting for the BIg O by Daniel Huntley Solon:

Political drama is a minefield. The compulsion to discuss hot-button issues seems, more often than not, to beget messy and overwrought or overtly agenda-laden work and halt open conversation, rather than inspire it. Not that it can't and hasn't been done really well; it's just that the bar is high.

Waiting for the Big O chooses a different tactic, purportedly choosing museum-piece observations of the political climate in November 2008 rather than dissection of the deeper connotations of those events. [. . . ]

Click to read full text (232 words) at Austinist.com

Update on City Arts Funding Revisions

The advisory Arts Commission of the City of Austin met in special session on Monday night, March 22, to consider changes to arts funding prepared by City staff in response to an opinion deliver by the City's legal office. After hearing citizen comments, the Commission voted unanimously to urge City Council members to reject the new criteria, which could have the consequences, inter alia, of cutting off grants for education and arts outreach.

Commission leaders and Latifah Taormina, Executive Director of the Greater Austin Creative Alliance (GACA) briefed arts organizations on March 23.

The story has broken in the press. Dan Solomon of Austinist.com surveys the issue and legal texts, as well as interviewing major players. Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, writing on the Statesman's Arts360 "Seeing Things" blog, does a brief summary but provides pertinent numbers and percentages regarding Austin's revenues from the hotel and occupancy tax.

Latifah Taormina provides an update today, March 23, by e-mail and on the NowPlaying Austin blog, opening, "It's working. . . . " Her piece includes notes about the action plan items suggested by arts organizations.

The Internet-based private news service InFactDaily.com reports that City Council members were taken by surprise by the deluge of more than 500 e-mails on the proposed changes in criteria for arts funding and they are displeased with city management. The article quotes acting mayor Mike Martinez, Randi Shade and Bill Spellman. Full text of report is reprinted by permission at the Austin Jazz Workshop website.

Upcoming: Falling by Dan Solomon, a staged reading, November 21

Received directly:

Falling

a staged reading of a new play by Dan Solomon
with Jennymarie Jemison and Spencer Driggers

When Jessica went to bed on the night of September 10th, 2001, she wasn't sure that she and her husband Adam would be together by the end of the year. By 10:30 the next morning, that question seemed to be rendered irrelevant - he worked on the 95th floor of the North Tower.

Three years later, getting an answer has only become more important, but that leaves her with an even more pressing question: How much is she ready to learn about what was happening with Adam before the towers fell?

12 noon, Saturday, November 21st
Dougherty Arts Center
1110 Barton Springs Rd (map)
free admission

No One Else Will Ever Love You by Katherine Craft, private residences, August 28 - September 12

Offering a play in someone's house or apartment breaks down some of the conventions of theatre. There's more of a sense of risk for all concerned -- players, audience and host.

In most theatrical events the audience is anonymous, a collection of shapes outside the brightly lit playing space. And most of them like it that way. The front row never fills up first. Maybe there's a latent worry about sitting within grasp of the actors.

No One Else Will Ever Love You is theatre up close, in the living room instead of in the reassurance of a formal theatre setting. The cast uses a different living space each weekend.

I was wandering around condominiums on East 33rd street last Friday evening with an address on a slip of paper. I must have been pretty obvious when I walked behind the building into the parking lot. "Looking for the play?" asked a neighbor as he was pulling out of his parking slot. "It's over there, behind that wall."

I walked back around to the front. No sign. It was dark outside the ground floor apartment. But through the window I could see a few persons standing in the living room. I knocked, asked, and was admitted.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: No One Else Will Ever Love You by Katherine Craft, private location, August 28 - September 12

UPDATE: ALT review of September 8

UPDATE: Actor Bastion Carboni interviews director Dan Solomon on Austinist.com, 8/28

Received directly and explored on-line:

No One Else Will Ever Love You

by Katherine Craft
Directed by Dan Solomon
Starring JennyMarie Jemison, Spencer Driggers, Karina Dominguez, and Bastion Carboni.

Rick and Jen are back in the country after their honeymoon, and they've invited Rick's best friend Nora, along with her boyfriend Charlie, over for dinner. As they open their fifth bottle of wine, Rick and Charlie both struggle with their desire to dominate the room - and more importantly, Nora. Staged in the living rooms of local volunteers, this one-act play about the chess matches that some men play for power over the women in their lives, and the subsequent effort to be no one's pawn, presents a visceral and immediate theatrical experience.

August 28 and 29,September 4 and 5,September 11 and 12
All performances are at 8pm.

All tickets are $10 and available online at www.nooneelsewilleverloveyou.com. Venue addresses will be given after ticket purchase. All venues are centrally located in Austin.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .